10 Songs to Teach Past Simple and Past Continuous Tense

If you are looking for songs to teach Past Simple and Past Continuous, music is one of the easiest ways to bring these two tenses together in a natural context. Students hear the contrast between an action that was already in progress and one that interrupted it, without needing a grammar chart to explain it.

Without music, life would be a mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche

All these songs can be used as a simple gap fill activity, but they can also work as models for writing similar songs with the same grammar pattern, or as a way to talk about stories and the past in general.

Here is my playlist, and just below it, you will find the readers’ playlist, made up of suggestions shared in the comments over the years.

These songs are here to help us create fun lessons, change the pace of a class, and bring some beautiful old songs from the 70s, 80s and 90s into the classroom.

10 Songs to teach Past Simple and past Continuous

My Playlist

• Because You Loved Me – Celine Dion — strong past simple narrative, good for a storytelling gap fill
• Jealous Guy – John Lennon — one of the clearest examples of past continuous,
• Hotel California – The Eagles — mixes both tenses in a story that works well for sequencing activities
• Storyman – Chris de Burgh — simple past simple narrative,
• Easy for lower levels Fairy Tale – Alexander Rybak — fast-paced past simple, good for a listening race
• Seasons in the Sun – Terry Jacks — reflective past simple, useful for a discussion follow-up
• Our Last Summer – ABBA — combines both tenses naturally around a memory
• No Reply – Beatles — short and repetitive, good for beginners
• Candle in the Wind – Elton John — past simple narrative with strong imagery
• You Were There – Eric Clapton — simple structure, easy for a first gap fill try

Readers’ Playlist

• I Am Sailing – Rod Stewart Another Yellow
• Lemon Tree – Fool’s Garden (often misremembered as just “Lemon Tree”)
• Driving to Damascus – Big Country — a reader favourite with PET-level students, and one of the few songs on this list that has both past simple and past continuous in the same lines
• Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen — a more contemporary option with clear past continuous use

Would you like to add more to the readers’ playlist? And if you try one of these songs in your class, why not share how it went?

How to Use These Songs in Class

Once you’ve picked a few songs to teach Past Simple and Past Continuous, here is a simple structure that takes about 20-25 minutes:

1. Pre-listening. Write five past simple and five past continuous sentences on the board, some correct and some with the wrong tense. Ask students to guess before listening.
2. First listen. Play the song once with books closed. Ask students what the song is about in general.
3. Gap fill. Give a lyrics handout with the verbs removed. Play the song again and let students fill in the gaps.
4. Check and discuss. Go through the answers together and ask why each tense was used. This is where the real grammar noticing happens.
5. Follow-up task. Ask students to write two or three sentences about their own life using the same pattern, one past simple action interrupted by a past continuous one.

This works well as a warmer, a change of pace mid-lesson, or a full grammar practice session depending on how much time you give it.

Bonus Tracks

• From Vicky Loras’s Blog by Vicky Loras The Day Coldplay Came to Our Classroom
• From mELTing Activities by Carissa Peck Opinion Paragraph with Lyrics

Whichever songs you pick from this list, using songs to teach Past Simple and Past Continuous keeps grammar practice memorable instead of mechanical.

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